There was an IRS statute that all American citizens living abroad were required to pay US taxes. Sutherland pointedly asked, ‘Are you a US citizen still?’
Nate politely refused to answer. He felt a grave and sudden danger that this had been a grand trap to bring him back to America. It turned out not to be the case. Weatherly, Sutherland, and Saunders were just asserting their collective history. It was that simple.
The terms of Helen’s will as pertaining to him was read, the minutes taken by the Latino secretary. The lawyers dispersed to their various palatial offices. Appointments were lined up. Each office was almost identical. Each looked out on the city in the great expanse of glass and light amidst the upper-reaches of the other skyscrapers.
It proved a powerful and evocative sight, reminding Nate of his father’s office, and how hard it was to scale to such heights, and that, after the day schools and the great promise he had shown early, he lived now in the shadow of a hill by a lake six hours northwest of Toronto. It was not so much a lament, as a fact.
The Latino secretary executed the release of the reels as Nate went about signing the forms, but then hesitated. He first read the disclosure statement with the distinct fear that, if he didn’t do so, he might have been signing some document of admission, some legal statement of guilt.
The Latino secretary was on the phone. Moments later another Hispanic woman, less pretty and older, appeared from a back office. A conversation, the entirety of it, was conducted in Spanish, so Nate was a stranger, twice removed in his own country.
It would be a few minutes longer, the Latino secretary advised him. He was obliging, cordial and enamored with her. He recalled again the same breathless anticipation of how he had used to sit in advance of Ursula serving him, before she had arrived at his cabin with her rhubarb pie.
It was strange, how a history went two ways, this Latino’s run for the border, a history she might tell her children and grandchildren, while he had escaped America. He might have told her about Ursula and his own life, or how a beauty like hers shouldn’t be cheapened with lipstick, stockings and heels.
*
Nate Feldman might have left Chicago. There was nothing that held him, but he had been up since 5 a.m. He knew he should rest. He would leave at first light the next day.
He looked up in the rush of emotion and tried to set his mind elsewhere. So much was lost to him. Nothing was as he remembered really.
The room, for instance, hadn’t the luxury he had anticipated. The windows lay in the shadow of other buildings, in the slim margin of a reduced and angled light.The largesse of what he assumed had been there before was now gone. The attached suites and a bar area had been swapped out for the confinement of refurbished rooms cut in size from their original grandeur to boxy rooms with a king size bed so Nate had to literally walk over the bed to get to the small bathroom comprised of a stand-up shower, sink and a toilet wedged against a towel rack radiator, hot as an iron.
This had happened, these changes, since the Vietnam era. When he had left, there had still been the Playboy Mansion facing the Lake, and an understanding that certain women might spend their best years in rabbit ears, bunny tails and heels, toting trays of cigarettes and cigars, and that neither the city nor the country, nor the women for that matter, saw any contradiction, subjugation or irony in any of it.
His father had subscribed to Playboy, kept it within reach on a nightstand. What he could say was that there was no Playboy Mansion anymore. It had disappeared from the skyline. Not that it was undone, the baser instinct that kept the species going, these instincts confined now to a rougher sexual content percolating just below the surface, to a place off of center — so, on the Internet, there were sites where it was not uncommon to see a girl eating cum from the gaping asshole of another girl. It was a search word away.
Nate stood in the grey dark, yawned and then checked his email. He was waiting for something without acknowledging he had been waiting for something, waiting for Norman Price’s email.
Norman Price had not replied, so Nate was reconciled that there never would be a meeting. He let the fact settle amidst the dispirited sense that there was no going back ever.
Life moved on.
He was tired and yet he could not sleep. Minutes later he was back online. He did a search for an old-fashioned reel-to-reel projector. The reels were of that vintage. He searched Craigslist and found a projector offered by someone in Chicago. He might yet view the tapes before leaving for home.
It was done, the search and bid in less than twenty minutes.
In the stand-up shower, under the high-pressure water, he tried to release a memory of what Ursula was like. Disconcertingly, her face refused to show itself. What he saw was the Latino secretary, so it was hard to hold on to what was then and what was now.
*
Nate reached for the blankets, drew himself into a ball on the bed. He felt the smallness of the room around him. He thought of the lawyers in their prejudicial assessment of him. What did they know of his life really! Those early years of a new beginning where nothing had come easy or been granted him. He could say that in all honesty. The organics business had begun as a means of subsistence, a supplement to the wages he had drawn at the mill.
The work at the mill was then new to him, but in the act of physical labor he had grown strong and confident, and, though it had put him on an equal footing with those who had worked the mill their entire lives, he had quietly taken a correspondence course with an agricultural college.
He was with Ursula at that point, the quiet insistence of her presence compelling a great and earnest want in him to do better, to make a home for her. They had savings in a jar, wads of bills with the picture of Queen Elizabeth, a decree of royal patronage that somehow subtly denied the present its absolute hold on life. He believed that, to achieve great things, you had to move outside the influence of yourself, that you had to spin in the vortex of a space you created that let you be within and outside what you were.
In this belief, he shared a truth with Frank Grey Eyes, that, in all traditions there had been the presiding influence of a psyche, be it a guardian angel or a modern day shrink. You had to distance yourself from the self.
In that process of self-improvement, Ursula had brought him scones and flat cakes and black tea sweetened with honey and watched him study, so Nate was conscious of the act of the act of watching her watch him. Their lives grew in a deeper soil.
Ursula had kept the doors in the cabin open out of native habit, the world alive with sound. This was her world and she would not be dissuaded. She listened to the purling throat of the falls at the edge of Grandshire. She could identify the cry of osprey, geese and loons. She called Nate’s attention to the insistent tap-a-tat-tat of woodpeckers, and the far-off whine of the sawmill. She could read the seasons in the cry of animals, in the directional shift of winds. She was a student in her own right.
Nate had followed the advice of provincial government pamphlets received through the mail out of Ottawa. There was help in the way the federal government in the United States had once been a friend to the farmer, to the rugged individualist. He used a potash fertilizer as a hold against a depleted soil, grew a cold hardy root crop of beets, rutabaga, squash, yams, sweet potatoes, parsnips and carrots. He tapped a line of trees for maple syrup, ordered a colony of bees from Prince Edward Island and planted a winter hardy grape vine and apple trees. It became a homestead slowly.
He worked on his studies early in the morning before leaving for the mill, and late in the evening after work, by candlelight in the advancing fall when the sun fell early and there were not enough hours in the day.